Mark Memmott

Doby PhotographyNPR

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.

As the NPR Ethics Handbook states, the Standards & Practices editor is "charged with cultivating an ethical culture throughout our news operation. This means he or she coordinates regular training and discussion on how we apply our principles and monitors our decision-making practices to ensure we're living up to our standards."

Before becoming Standards & Practices editor, Memmott was one of the hosts of NPR's "The Two-Way" news blog, which he helped to launch when he came to NPR in 2009. It focuses on breaking news, analysis, and the most compelling stories being reported by NPR News and other news media.

Prior to joining NPR, Memmott worked for nearly 25 years as a reporter and editor at USA Today. He focused on a range of coverage from politics, foreign affairs, economics, and the media. He reported from places across the United States and the world, including half a dozen trips to Afghanistan in 2002-2003.

During his time at USA Today, Memmott, helped launch and lead three USAToday.com news blogs: "On Deadline," "The Oval" and "On Politics," the site's 2008 presidential campaign blog.

Wednesday's attack at the Paris office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo is thought to have been the work of killers who believe cartoons can be so offensive that they justified the murder of 12 people.

News organizations and people around the world obviously believe the opposite — that no one deserves to die just because he's rude, crude or otherwise obnoxious. Free speech includes the right to be offensive.

The biggest sports story of the week for millions of football (soccer) fans around the world was the sacking of David Moyes as manager of England's Manchester United, one of the two most valuable sports franchises on the planet.

In case you missed it, much is being made of what happened Thursday at the White House when a 10-year-old girl stepped forward at a take-your-children-to-work event with first lady Michelle Obama to say:

"My dad's been out of a job for three years and I wanted to give you his résumé."

The Two-Way

7:18 am

Fri April 25, 2014

A Nepalese government delegation met with Sherpa mountain guides near Mount Everest's base camp on the south side of the mountain Thursday. The government was hoping to persuade the guides to continue working even though 16 Sherpas had died a week earlier. But fresh ice avalanches on Friday appear to have doomed Nepal's climbing season.

High up on the Nepalese side of Mount Everest, fresh ice avalanches on Friday made it "almost certain that no one will summit the world's highest mountain from Nepal during this year's climbing season," Reuters writes.